[meteorite-list] First Asteroid Discovered in 2014 Has Impact (2014 AA)

[Ron Baalke]

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news182.html
    
First Asteroid Discovered in 2014 Has Impact (2014 AA)
NASA/JPL Near-Earth Object Program Office
January 2, 2014

Early Wednesday morning January 1st, while New Year's 2014 celebrations
were still underway in the United States, the Catalina Sky Survey near
Tucson, AZ, collected a single track of observations with an immediate
follow-up on what was possibly a very small asteroid 2-3 meters in size
on a potential impact trajectory with the Earth. Designated 2014 AA,
which would make it the first asteroid discovery of 2014, the track of
observations on the object allowed only an uncertain orbit to be
calculated. However if this was a very small asteroid on an Earth
impacting trajectory, it most likely hit the Earth's atmosphere last
night sometime between 2 pm Wednesday and 9 am Thursday EST. Using the
only available observations, three independent projections of the
possible orbit by the independent orbit analyst Bill Gray, the Minor
Planet Center in Cambridge, MA, and Steve Chesley at the NASA NEO
Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are in agreement that it
would hit Earths atmosphere. According to Chesley, because of the orbit
uncertainty the potential impact locations are widely distributed,
falling along an arc extending from Central America to East Africa with
the best-fit, most likely impact location to be just off the coast of
West Africa at about 9 pm EST January 1st. 2014 AA was unlikely to have
survived atmospheric entry intact, as it was comparable in size to 2008
TC3 - about 2-3 meters which completely broke up over northern Sudan in
October 2008, the only other example of an object discovered just prior
to hitting the Earth. So far, there have been a few weak signals
collected from infrasound stations in that region of the world that are
being analyzed to see if they could be correlated to the atmospheric
entry of 2014 AA.